How To Measure and Improve Your Position on the APM Maturity Curve
Considering a new solution for Asset Performance Management (APM)? Start by assessing the maturity of your current capabilities and identifying what’s needed to achieve best practice.
If you’re getting ready to invest in your APM program, it’s important to understand the pitfalls of traditional approaches to APM and how to avoid APM buyer’s regret. It’s equally important to understand how to measure and improve your APM maturity.
We’ve developed our own Maturity Index to help those seeking to achieve Integrated APM. The index measures maturity across four key functional aspects of APM, including asset health management, asset strategy management, asset defect elimination, and work management.
Where organizations sit on the APM maturity curve, depends on the maturity of each function and how closely they integrate with one another. For example, organizations sitting at the top of the maturity curve typically have consistent and robust processes to drive effective prioritization and execution of work. They also have integrated processes and systems to drive workflow and enable a complete view of asset health and risk.
Three steps to accurately assess your APM capabilities
While our Maturity Index will help you assess your organization against best-in-class, the accuracy of the assessment depends on how well you understand your current capabilities.
Here we share three steps you can take to form an accurate view.
1. Gather and analyze your data
A thorough review of your data will provide a good foundation for your assessment. Start by evaluating whether you have all the information needed to support each function of asset management. Some specific questions to ask include:
- Do you have master reliability data readily available?
- Do you have documented processes in place to support prioritization and execution of work?
- Do you have consistent maintenance plans for like assets?
- How complete are your routine maintenance plans? Do they have the required materials and work instructions attached?
- Do you have failure coding in place?
- Do you have a structured continuous improvement process in place for asset strategies?
- Do you have a defect elimination program in place?
2. Interview subject matter experts
Your data may suggest you have the right processes and maintenance plans in place, but to know they’re effective, you need to speak to those responsible for carrying out the work. For example, ask your reliability engineers how they decide which assets to monitor and which alarms to investigate. This type of questioning will help you understand whether your asset health management processes are clear and effectively followed.
To facilitate an open and honest conversation, make sure those interviewed understand you’re looking for opportunities to improve. Otherwise, they may just tell you what they think you want to hear.
3. Take a broader view
While there can be some value in assessing maturity at a site level, we encourage taking an organization-wide approach. This could involve assessing data and speaking to subject matter experts at a corporate level in addition to site-specific reviews. The questions and assessment here would be evaluating how consistent the execution of health and strategy workflows are across all sites/facilities. Asking how well can improvements be leveraged across simialr assets on different sites.